Sunday, August 06, 2006

Hanady Salman (editor at As-Safir in Beirut) sent this:
"Good morning ,
I had a good time yesterday evening. Not so good, I hate going out in dark, empty streets. It reminds me of the war, and so far, I've been trying to live in denial as much as I could. I put my "automatic engine " on, and take things one hour, half an hour .. at a time.
I had nightmares last night. Lots of them, and woke up I don't know how many times to find out I was only dreaming. This denial issue is a big issue over here. You see, if we were to grasp ( let alone understand) the whole scope of what's happening, we'll spare the Israelis a whole lot of US tax payers money : we'd all explode, die from natural causes such as heart failures and the likes. OK , I give some reasons why I dread the day when this war will be over:
We already have ONE MILLION refugees all over the (tiny) country. What can any state, country , government do with one million refugees? November is almost two months away, that's when the winter season settles in for real in here. Now think of the wiped out villages. Who's going to remove all the rubble ? No one wants to think now about rebuilding, it took us some 15 years and some 40 billion dollars in debts to do it once before.Anyway , it was not over yet, rebuilding ( and the debt) that is. Then , there are scattered families who still have hopes that once this is over they might find their loved ones. What will happen when they find out how many of them died. If all these people start crying together , at the same moment, at the same minute, hard enough, I mean as hard as anyone would cry when they loose one family member, and then there will be others crying even harder because they would have lost more than one family members ( I think she should stop counting as of 3 and above ). So, if they do cry as hard as expected, how far away would they be heard? Now , the other thing is the kind of weird diseases starting to spread out because of the physical presence of so many corpses outdoors almost everywhere in the South, and elsewhere. By the time this is over, these diseases would have killed another good bunch. Thus, the one thing I'm hoping for right now , is a 24 hour truth so we can bury the dead and empty the hospitals refrigerators. And then , they can start over, and go on as much as they like , pushing as far as possible the day when denial will have to fall."